Live DJing in High School
I had a few other great opportunities in high school with live DJ work. First, in the storage rooms at my high school I discovered several nice fat amps that were not too old, and my audiophile band instructor picked up a few more cheap. By the end of my sophomore year I was DJing all the Friday night dances and some of the other big gigs like homecoming and Prom and such with a stack of equipment that would always shake things loose from the ceiling tiles.
The first few gigs were fun, but then I realized there was something missing. It was just loud music, and I wanted more of a show. I began gathering some of the lighting equipment I had discovered in the auditorium and using that with various home-made switch boxes and such, but that only went so far. I eventually started doing gigs on my own and with my older brother (who was a student at U of O) and landed us a few sorority and fraternity gigs. We needed better lights and a road audio kit which I couldn’t take from the high school. So I hooked up with Eye Beam light & sound.
As luck would have it, I ended up working for them doing minor repairs to all different types of equipment, some I didn’t even know what it did! I apparently had a logical enough mind for electronics though that I was able to ferret out bad fuses, bulbs, transistors, caps, etc… which were keeping a large pile of the equipment out of service at any one time. In addition to some minimum wage payment for my work, I was also given access to just about anything I wanted at little or no cost for the weekends I was doing gigs so long as it wasn’t booked for bigger shows they were doing.
I don’t recall how many gigs I did in total during high school, but I think I spent more on CD’s than I made on all of them combined, but I loved putting on a big light and sound show and every client I had had nothing but praise for my work. It may not have been profitable, but it was fun and I certainly learned a lot.